List of Brightest Stars

[Stub Mandrel]

I would like to find a spreadsheet with the co-ordinates of just the brightest stars - those I might want to use for aligning a GOTO mount. Ideally name, constellation RA and DEC down to seconds.

I found an ideal list but it's only 17, which is too few, but the ideal list for me would be just the stars that make up the 'accepted' constellation so I could use them to plot simple star maps to help locate stars.

The problem is that any non-short lists appear to be thousands of stars long, or not contain the above information.

I'm sure what i want is out there but I can't dream up a sensible search term for Google.

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Here's a list with the 50 brightest, and here's another with the brightest 300. Hope that's some help.

[Stub Mandrel]

That's ideal - many thanks!

Most Chivalrous ;-)

[Putaendo Patrick]

You might also consider the so-called Navigational Stars. In total, 173 stars are so designated and used by mariners, pilots etc. and listed in Nautical Almanacs.  Of these, 57 are the most common with the majority having Arabic names:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selected_stars_for_navigation

http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/gem-projects/hm/0203-1-12-celestial_navigation/navigationalstars.htm

The Stellarium program has a sextant icon in the toolbar which will highlight these.

[Stub Mandrel]

Thanks Patrick.

I've used the 300 stars list. For those interested ~300 stars with name (2 bytes for RA and DEC, including things like  "Sigma Canis Majoris" where there isn't a short name) and constellation names with stop bytes for the strings and a record marker) comes to rather less than 7K. I might convert some names  from the "Sigma Canis Majoris" format to just "sigma" given that constellation names will be there anyway.

[Stub Mandrel]

Argh......

Spent ages editing the list of 300 brightest stars to make it usable data for my program.

Just opened it up and discovered I have neatly sorted it in alphabetical constellation order... after removing the magnitude data.

 

[ronin]

You might want to search out the Meade alignment stars for their ETX scopes. Guess that Weasner's site is a fair start.

Meade defined a set of bright, standalone stars for alignment and their list cannot be too long and it must cover the whole year. I likely have it somewhere but all lost in the general astro info folder.

#497 Alignment stars: http://www.weasner.com/etx/autostar/as_497align_stars.html

Can likely import into a spread sheet very quick.

Never realised that so many stars start with "A".

[Stub Mandrel]

19 minutes ago, ronin said:

Never realised that so many stars start with "A".

That would have helped, but I now have the 50 brightest stars with names and constellations, but not magnitudes.

lots start with 'Al' because it's Arabic for 'The...'

I think I've done most of the heavy lifting now, an unbelievable number of menus and displays, most of which are just for entertainment while I watch the camera! For example, twinned clocks with local and sidereal time, but I am proud of the little mimic of the polarscope reticle with a dot in the right(!) place.

Just the actual mount pointing bit to write now!

(... then lunar phase display and basic star maps... and the digital thermometer... and the heaters ... and the focuser... and the USB link...)

If at the end EVERYTHING is controllable from one handset with five buttons, I'll be happy.

 

Compilation screenshots to follow.